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Just spent a half-hour meeting with Mario Lemieux and Ron Burkle in a Consol Energy Center office. Only others in the room were David Morehouse, CEO, and Tom McMillan, VP of communications.

Keep refreshing, as I’m just going to keep updating the file as I type it out. The entire conversation was on the record.

DK: What’s the best way to describe what was announced today?

Burkle: Well, let’s start with this: We start here with a lot of great qualities. We’ve got a community that gives us a lot of support, the fans, the youth hockey, a lot of different areas that allow us to run to the cap if that’s the place we need to be. And we wake up every day with Sidney Crosby and Evgeni Malkin. So we wake up in a pretty good place.

We aren’t happy to be in the top quartile. If you make it to this round, you’re in the top quartile. That’s good enough for some. It isn’t where we want to be. And as we looked at this team as a whole, the whole year and not Game 7, we don’t think we’ve got a team that’s got all the ingredients we’d need to have for a championship team. And all the things we’d expected to have for a championship team. So, to us, well before Game 7, we looked at how best we’d need to find those things …

Lemieux: The grit, the character. Even on the special teams, you’ve got to have some guys in the playoffs with grit, with character, as well as speed.

DK: Now, you always had that around you, that grit and character. No matter who you had to tick off, you made sure you had it.

Lemieux: (Laughs) Like I’ve said before, it’s a two-month tournament. To get to the end, you’ve got to go through a lot of adversity.

DK: Now, when some hear that, they think right away of fighters. That’s not what it’s about, is it?

Lemieux: No, just players who have some grit and character. We felt that was lacking this year.

Burkle: No matter how well we did this year, we didn’t have that. And it was something that had to be addressed.

DK: The root of any successful franchise is the draft. How big of a problem was the drafting?

Lemieux: It’s a problem. We’ve drafted well on defense. We’ve got some great prospects coming up, guys who are still in Wilkes-Barre, in juniors. We haven’t done as well at forward, obviously, but we’ve got some defensemen, some young guys we feel can step in over the next year or two.

DK: Why wouldn’t there have been a recognition earlier on that this team wasn’t tough? I mean, you could see in training camp that wasn’t the case.

Lemieux: (Shrugs)

DK: Yeah, me, neither.

Lemieux: That’s just the way the team was put together.

DK: Was there ever any edict from either of you, after the Matt Cooke mess, that the Penguins had to become this squeaky-clean team?

Burkle: We’ve read that. It’s not true.

DK: You know what I’m asking, right? This idea that because Mario spoke up about the Islanders a couple years ago that the Penguins had to become the role model?